The slave trade and the origins of matrilineal kinship

Abstract

Matrilineal kinship systems—where descent is traced through mothers only—are present all over the world but are most concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa. We explore the relationship between exposure to Africa’s external slave trades, during which millions of people were shipped from the continent during a 400-year period, and the evolution of matrilineal kinship. Scholars have hypothesized that matrilineal kinship, which is well-suited to incorporating new members, maintaining lineage continuity and insulating children from the removal of parents (particularly fathers), was an adaptive response to the slave trades. Motivated by this, we test for a connection between the slave trades and matrilineal kinship by combining historical data on an ethnic group’s exposure to the slave trades and the presence of matrilineal kinship following the end of the trades. We find that the slave trades are positively associated with the subsequent presence of matrilineal kinship. The result is robust to a variety of measures of exposure to the slave trades, the inclusion of additional covariates, sensitivity analyses that remove outliers, and an instrumental variables estimator that uses a group’s historical distance from the coast as an instrument. We also find evidence of a complementarity between polygyny and matrilineal kinship, which were both social responses to the disruption of the trades. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Social norm change: drivers and consequences’.